Advanced functionalities are sought to be added to luminaires, partly due to the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Such functionalities include online monitoring of luminaire data, such as lumen output, calibration data, power delivery, metering data, ON & OFF schedules, maintenance records, location data, etc. Furthermore, these new functionalities can include providing support or control of nearby devices, such as transferring and/or receiving data from parking meters to detect presence of absence of parked cars, monitoring, controlling, and processing data from cameras, for security or pedestrian traffic management applications. In sum, IoT technologies will bring forth the age of the “smart luminaire,” which will be only one of many aspects of new “smart cities.”
Nevertheless, manufacturing and deploying such smart luminaires may be highly cost-prohibitive, or in some instances, the cost of manufacturing and deploying such luminaires may not scale favorably. This is partly due to the fact that for each additional functionality desired, a specific luminaire having the hardware capable of supporting the additional functionality must be manufactured. This leads to increased product skews, which in turns increases manufacturing costs and complexity.